It is probably our most popular question right now in California. This is a California-specific law. And many states already recognize nurses and provide nurses with the authority to practice autonomously. California was one of those holdout states that didn’t for years until now. And I’ll say that with caveats because I’ll explain kind of what the deal is here in California going forward.

There’s this new law that passed and it became enacted in this year, January 1, 2023, and it creates two new categories of nurse practitioners. And I say nurse practitioners specifically. It does not apply to registered nurses. And the first category, it’s called a 103 nurse practitioner. 103 refers to the code section. It allows a nurse practitioner to work in a group setting with at least one other physician and surgeon within the population focus of their national certification without procedures and protocols with that physician.

So you no longer need that collaboration agreement between you as the NP and the physician if you apply with the Board and they authorize you to do so. So there’s still some hoops that you need to jump through. It doesn’t just apply automatically to every NP.

To quickly just clarify, the group setting that I’m referring to in this first category, the practice still needs to be owned by a physician and it could be partially owned by you as the NP since you do have that right already to own up to 49%, but it does require a physician to own at least 51% of that medical corporation.

So now to the second category, which is really the one that a lot of nurse practitioners have been waiting for years for, understandably, is the 104 nurse practitioner category. And this category would allow a nurse practitioner to work completely independently in their own practice without being part of a practice that’s partially owned by a physician.